(Newser)
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Facebook's recent "smear campaign" against Google may have been bad PR, but the social media giant had a good point—Google's "social search" function can be problematically thorough, even when users takes steps to protect their privacy, writes Lauren Indvik at Mashable. "I have always been vaguely aware that Google knows essentially everything about me, but knowing that anyone can look through my various social connections and networks associated with my name from my personal email address is still a bit of a shock," says Indvik.

While Google only uses public information for its profiles, its search engine can go through your websites and other information to find secondary social connections that perhaps users did not want listed in their profiles. Still, Indvik says that Facebook is no hero here, and is most likely motivated by annoyance that Google has found a way to use Facebook data without engaging Facebook's advertising revenue system. But Facebook could do something about it. "After all, the only Facebook information that can appear in Google’s search results are those that are public status updates," she writes. "If Facebook encouraged users to lock down their accounts, they could limit the usefulness of Google’s data-mining efforts."

Zuckerberg and Brin/Page - "Two" evil young men, angry with one another because each wants to steal the other's data (which actually is YOUR data). You're infringing on my holy RIGHT to be the biggest billionaire , each snarls at the other. I long for the day when our brightest and best stop becoming IT thieves and hedgebook trader thieves, and become teachers, engineers and doctors again.